Content note: This essay has bugs in it.

 

And lizards, and snakes, and other creeping, crawling things. I can’t help it, because these days I find myself thinking a lot about these little interlopers, and monsters, and immortality, and what is a long life, and in contrast what is a short life, and what each is worth.

It did not start with dog-sitting at Kate Elliott’s home on Oʻahu, Hawaiʻi, but that had a huge impact. The entire two weeks was a parade of unexpected animal encounters. Once a bird got in (its mate screaming outside over the abduction). Another time it was an impossibly large spider. I stood back and watched each time as Kate Elliott’s son gently caught the wayward creature and released it outside.

At one point I messaged Kate a joke about a gecko I spied on the wall. “Bad news, another gecko in the house, but think what you’ll save on car insurance,” I said. “Oh yes, that’s one of several,” she replied placidly. “They keep the insect population inside the house in check.” Where I grew up, in the woods of central Maryland, spiders and skinks were frequent intruders and they were killed with extreme prejudice.

Kate’s ease about indoor geckos and her son’s gentleness wore on me. As it happened, I was kicking around a manuscript that featured a cast of immortal and long-lived fantasy races, and I had been trying to get into the headspace for writing them. How do immortals view the world? I decided they must see humans much in the same way that we see insects and other small creatures; tiny, insignificant, short, fragile lives, easily snuffed out by gargantuan hands.

This thought spiral finds me frequently arrested with indecision over whether I should smash a dark-winged fungus gnat or usher it toward a door, or burdened with the time it will take to find a cup and a stiff piece of paper in order to trap a spider and release it outside.

And more than once I’ve been quietly contemplating a crawling thing, counting its segments and admiring its iridescent colors, only for an uninvited hand to slam down upon it. Some vanquishing hero saw the bug and thought I was in distress. I wasn’t, and before I can articulate the horror of having a bug crushed in front of my face, they assure me that no thanks is necessary, they were happy to help. The sheer confidence they display is what sticks with me.

At times, it seems we are hardwired to treat these small creatures as enemies to be eradicated. So many gardeners I talk to view their gardens as battlegrounds, full of bad critters—the insects, rabbits, “pests” that eat flowers and vegetables, the blue jays, grackles, and crows that behave like unruly frat bros at the bird feeder—and good critters—bees and butterflies that pollinate flowers, pretty songbirds. Even some of the helpers are considered bad because they frighten us humans: predators like toads, wasps, spiders, and snakes that would keep undesirable pests out of the garden if allowed to stay.

But what is “good” and what is “evil” in the natural world? What purpose do these very human notions serve? I’ve watched many a discussion about the cruelty of nature. I’ve seen people confess to interrupting a predator’s meal to save some poor animal—a rabbit, a bird—in its clutches. This might be mercy for the rabbit or bird (or not, as they often die from the trauma anyway), but what of the predator, which is also an animal trying to survive? Now it has spent precious energy on a lost meal, and the merciful human has given it more work to do. Human logic perceives the predator’s actions as an interruption of the natural order, and intervening is restoring balance. We do not consider that in the natural world, humans are also predators.

Becky Chambers shares an excellent anecdote of what can happen when life cycles are interrupted in A Psalm for the Wild-Built. The anecdote is an analog for the ecological transformation documented when wolves were reintroduced to Yellowstone National Park, but it also brings to mind the loss of wolves and cougars on the East Coast. These predators were driven to extirpation by human activity. In their absence, deer populations have thrived. They have done so well, in fact, that now they are something of a plague. Deer, in staggeringly high numbers, over-browse important native flora, thus reducing food for other wild herbivores and enabling invasive flora to spread. They are a breeding ground for ticks. They wander onto roads, endangering drivers. They even descend upon neighborhoods, feasting on home gardens (a consequence of both increased numbers and decreased habitat). Of course, we did not kill all the wolves and cougars to spare the deer, but the relationship serves as a cautionary tale of what happens when we upset the natural balance.

Chambers drew an intentional parallel with this anecdote, but I find myself making similar connections in all my Science Fiction and Fantasy reading, where monster battles are a common feature. In many role-playing games, the monster is an important game mechanic. It is an obstacle for the heroes to overcome, to test their mettle and raise their skills so that they may be equal to the next obstacle on their path.

The monsters are not characters, and thus are described flatly. They are ugly and vicious, pests that plague innocent civilians. They are neither good nor evil, but they are bad, and the hero or hunter is doing a public service by ridding the world of them.

In stories such as these, my mind begins to wander. Yes yes, they’re very nasty, but what is their role in the local ecosystem? How many are they? Are they a keystone species? If they were to be eradicated, would the ecosystem collapse? If they are preying on livestock or humans, then why? Is it possible that towns and farmland have consumed their native habitat? What were they eating before human civilization arrived? Has the loss of habitat impacted their natural food source, replacing game with easy livestock? What are humans doing to ensure their settlements do not drastically transform the local ecosystem to the point that the fauna alter their behavior in undesirable ways?

I imagine few think this deeply about the role of monsters in their stories, just as few humans think this deeply about the little “monsters” in their lives; the monsters with claws, fur, feathers, scales, and numerous eyes and legs. We do not think about the price of each bug squashed, each animal trapped, poisoned, or shot. We hole ourselves up in suburban neighborhoods with manicured lawns or concrete cities where we do not have to think about how each loss ripples through an ecosystem.

LeVar Burton once told a story on Reddit about a lesson he learned from Dr. Maya Angelou, his costar on Roots. As Burton thought to squash a spider that he felt was threatening the women on set, Dr. Angelou said this:

“Just because you are larger than a thing gives you no right to think you have control over its life or death. Because you are larger and more powerful means you have a responsibility to protect all life.”

If I’m honest, I didn’t first learn this lesson with Kate Elliott’s geckos. I learned it as a child, swatting and complaining about a fly in my face at a cookout I attended with a friend. The guy at the grill turned and admonished me, told me to leave the fly alone. “But what purpose does it serve?” my young friend and I challenged. “It’s alive,” said this complete stranger. “That’s all the purpose it needs to serve.”

So as an adult, I knew better. I knew that it was not my place to take a life in my hands simply because it was smaller than mine. However, it seemed to me that killing small critters was part of being a human being. It is an understandable reaction for a person to gasp at the sight of a fly, a spider, a cockroach, a lizard, a snake, and run for the nearest heavy object with which to smash it. It is the creature’s fault for intruding, for finding itself in a place where it is not wanted.

We rarely see ourselves as the intruder.

I find a parallel between the lesson Dr. Maya Angelou shared with LeVar Burton and the one an elder in my community shared with me. We are all Black Americans, and it is not a huge leap, as an oppressed class that has suffered the violence of colonialism, to see how colonialism ripples through time and impacts every corner of society.

Nowadays I see the scars of colonialism in our relationship with nature, how we claim territory that never belonged to us and declare any creatures that find themselves within our boundaries to be undesirable. It is nigh impossible for me to find resources on how to nurture and make space for wildlife in my garden. Do an internet search on rabbits, squirrels, foxes, deer, and any arthropod you can think of, and you will first find pages and pages about how to deter them. I feel myself a clown in my quest to live and let live.

The very notion of this endless war against nature exhausts me. To be a gardener, after all, is to intrude upon nature. Besides, it is a war that humans cannot win, because to win it—to eradicate nature—would be our doom. We approach nature with a “me versus them” mentality in much the same way that colonizers view the territories they invade. And of course, we take this colonist mindset right into our fiction, giving our vanquishing heroes control over life and death.

When I read or watch speculative stories now, my heart cries out to the monsters. Frieren: Beyond Journey’s End, telling the tale of a centuries-old elf on a quest, is especially cruel, since it is a TV show and thus you can see the monsters. And sometimes, they are not horrifying at all: Sometimes, they are beautiful.

And anyway, what if monsters are ugly and vicious? Are they not alive, serving the purpose they’ve evolved to serve? My only solace, in recent readings, has been Someone You Can Build a Nest In by John Wiswell, written from the point of view of the horrifying, hunted monster. It is a tale that compels the reader to see the beauty in the grotesque.

If nature is indeed cruel, then that is an edge that we have, because we are human beings, and we can choose humanity over cruelty. We can choose to be gentle and to protect. We are immortals among these small creatures with short, fragile lives, so what do we have to fear?

If nothing else, not waging war on nature gives you one less thing to do. And here’s the twist, for my fellow gardeners:

Critters in your garden mean you’ve got a thriving ecosystem. It is nature in balance, right in your own backyard.

We interrupt these life cycles at our own peril. Our kind survives by the grace of little monsters. When we lay waste to systems we did not build and do not fully understand, we doom not only nature, but ourselves. It is imperative that human beings learn this lesson while we’re still around to do so.

And, you know, give a kind thought to the monsters in your storytelling now and then, will you? The world you’ve crafted just might need them.

© 2026 Nilah Magruder